Inheritance Is Fixed

That was a digression, prompted by a question. But two questions follow from it. If a child is not adopted but just taken care of, they have no inheritance — an adopted child does not inherit. How, then, do they make their way? You are supposed to raise them and give them a job, teach them how to provide for themselves. And a lot of people do not get an inheritance in any case: families get into fights and the lawyers eat it up, which happens.

That is why it is good in Islamic law: it is all portioned out, and you cannot fight over it. It is fixed. The wife inherits; she is one of the inheritors. Inheritance laws are related to the Qurʾān directly: the Qurʾān determines what portions people get. And the wife does inherit from the husband — not all of it; the children have portions as well. The man can give one third of his wealth to whomever he wants; the other two thirds are determined by the Qurʾān.

And it is interesting that a man cannot divorce his wife on his deathbed. If a man has an illness that is called maraḍ al-mawt, like cancer, where the outcome is probable, it is prohibited for him to divorce his wife as a way of getting her out of the inheritance, or spiting her. It is prohibited. Islam is very strict about inheritance.

And one of the things, if you look traditionally — Hodgson points this out in The Venture of Islam — is that Islam actually breaks down monopoly. The inheritance laws are designed so that wealth is not accumulated into one small individual holding. Think about the nineteenth century: if you read Jane Austen's novels, that is a real theme in her novels — the injustice of women being completely disinherited in nineteenth-century England. And remember, this is the age of the Enlightenment, and here are women in nineteenth-century England being thrown out of their houses because there was not a male heir to take care of them. They lost all their money, or it went to the male. This happened very recently in Western civilisation.

In Islam the woman has a right to her husband's and her father's wealth. She gets a portion of her father's wealth as well. And this is one of the ways that women became wealthy in Islam. There are many historically; Umm Hānī is a wonderful example. She is in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Islam, where there is a little section on her: she married a husband, and she actually owned a factory, and then the husband claimed that it was his, like community property or something. And it did not hold up in court, according to Ibn Ḥajar: the judge said, no, it is her property. And that was in the thirteenth century.

That is a whole other subject, really related to the sharīʿah, and one to open up when the last hadith is taken up — because the sharīʿah is definitely one of the areas where there are a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions in this culture. People see it as very primitive law. Another thing about Islamic law is that there are many different opinions within it: the things that are clear, about which there is no debate, are not that many. In many of the situations there is an allowance for the intellect to understand and interpret the tradition.